Tag: advice
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Read the meeting minutes
If you’re looking to get more involved in your local community, there’s a quick and easy way to start doing that: read the meeting minutes. Your city’s government, library, school board, and other institutions are required by law to post their meeting agendas, minutes, and other reports online, and I’ve found that even just skimming…
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Don’t have a reading goal
If you want to enjoy reading, don’t have a reading goal. If you want to read more books by female authors or explore a new genre or something like that, go for it. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Once you say “I want to read X number of books this year,” whatever that…
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Cut the intro
Robin Rendle preaching the truth: Here’s one way to improve the thing you’re writing: cut the intro. Writing about the symbiosis between trees and mushrooms? Don’t start talking about how humanity has depended on trees since the blah blah blah. Just jump right in! Talking about new features in your app? Don’t start with the…
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Write thank-you notes to your favorite authors
Literally: find a favorite (not dead) author’s website and use their contact form to send them a message with specifics about why you like them. I’ve done this several times. The nice thing is they’re usually very accessible and responsive, maybe because they tend not to get the same kind of public praise as actors,…
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No more encores
Just getting this on the record: concert encores are dumb and bad. They’re a terrible collective fiction that need to die. Audiences should stop cheering for them and artists should stop planning for them. Just play all the songs you want to play, then end the show and get gone.
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Opposite views
From Mari Andrew’s 100 Things I Know: I know how easy it is to get disoriented. When you don’t want to get lost on your way back, look backwards frequently. Everything looks completely different from the opposite view. From the Okee Dokee Brothers’ “Possum’s Point of View”: Hangin’ upside down I learned The thing I…
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How to make time for art
I noticed three writers posted about similar things around the same time, so I thought I ought to pay attention… Oliver Burkeman: In the end, the reason actually doing things matters so much isn’t because it’s the right way to raise a successful adult, complete a novel, or achieve some other beneficial future goal. It’s…
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The Ben Folds principle of ignorance
Something I think about a lot are these lyrics from the Ben Folds song “Bastard”: You get smaller as the world gets bigThe more you know you know you don’t know shit“The whiz man” will never fit you like “the whiz kid” didSo why you gotta act like you know when you don’t know?It’s okay…
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The best parenting advice I’ve ever gotten
The best parenting advice I’ve ever gotten was from my own parent. Per my mom: When all else fails, lower your expectations. Runner-up is from my other parent. Per my dad: Kids spell love T-I-M-E.
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Advice for parents
Generally I take a liberal stance towards unsolicited advice. You never know when you’ll get something worthwhile, and you can always just ignore the bad stuff. We’ll see if that stance changes once people start chiming in about particular parenting choices. So far I haven’t had a problem. In the meantime, Lifehacker’s Offspring parenting blog…
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Cursing the Corsair: typewriter repair as character building
Awhile back a patron donated a grey Smith Corona Corsair Deluxe typewriter to my library. She didn’t know why it wasn’t working but didn’t want to spend the time and effort to figure it out. Little did she know she brought it to one of the few libraries in the area where someone actually cared…
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Three Oatmeal Truths
Today at the library, I read Matthew “The Oatmeal” Inman’s The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances, an extended version of his original web comic about ultra-running. It’s of a piece with his usual ardent and absurdist takes on varying topics. In the book he illustrates a few tips for becoming a…